NEWARK, N.J. (AP) – New Jersey’s largest newspaper is cutting about 170 jobs, including 25 percent of its newsroom positions, as it moves to consolidate operations and cut costs.

The Star-Ledger reported Thursday on NJ.com that the cuts will mean the loss of 40 of the 156 newsroom staffers at the paper.

Other journalists at the newspaper are being offered jobs at NJ Advance Media, a new company being created by parent company Advance Publications to provide content, advertising and marketing services to all of its papers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The newspaper made the requests in response to the abrupt departures of former Superintendent Richard Como and former Director of Athletics and Activities Jim Donato.

Those requests, because the district hadn’t replied within 30 days of when it first said it needed more time to check on the legality of releasing the information, were deemed denied Thursday.

On Sept. 10, school board solicitor and attorney James Ellison advised the Daily Local the district needed an additional 30 calendar days beyond the usual five business days public entities have to respond to the newspaper’s Right to Know request.

The Times Leader has the second highest percentage growth rate in the nation — and highest in the state — for its total online and print audience, according to figures tracked by a newspaper auditing group.

The Times Leader ranked second among U.S. newspapers of any size participating in the most recently released report issued by the Alliance for Audited Media. The company used total online and print reader numbers available at the end of March to create its rankings of the top 25 papers.

The Times Leader’s audience of 219,656 was up 19.4 percent from the year prior figure of 184,037.

The Reading Eagle was named the top newspaper of its size in the state, and the newsroom won 20 awards in the Pennsylvania News Media Association’s annual Keystone Press Awards for work published in 2012.

The Eagle was the sweepstakes winner in Division 2, which is for daily newspapers with circulation between 40,000 and 74,999. Each newspaper is awarded sweepstakes points based on the number of awards its staffers won in the contest.

HARRISBURG – Nearly 5,000 Pennsylvania state employees earned at least $100,000 last year, and more than one-third worked for one of the 14 state-owned universities or the system that oversees them, a newspaper reported Monday.

The number of employees with six-figure earnings has more than quadrupled since 2002, when 1,176 people fell into that category, The Patriot-News said in stories posted on its website.

“What you see is pretty much how recession-proof that (state government) sector may be,” said Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor studies at Penn State University‘s Abington campus.

In the newspaper’s analysis of data from the state-government transparency website PennWATCH and the state courts, payouts for severance and unused leave time as well as job-related, non-salary income were counted as part of employees’ earnings.

Editor’s note: According to Wikipedia, in 2011 The Patriot-News averaged over 492,000 readers per week between their print edition and Pennlive.com. The newspaper was ranked in the top 100 in daily/Sunday circulation (United States) in 2005.

HARRISBURG, PA — The daily newspaper in Pennsylvania’s capital city is switching to a three-days-a-week publication schedule in January, in what it calls an adaptation to the changing world.

John Kirkpatrick, publisher of The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, announced the changes Tuesday in an email to friends of the newspaper.

The email didn’t say which days the paper will be published. It says the change will be accompanied by an expansion of the paper’s around-the-clock news coverage online.

“We are not making this move lightly,” said Kirkpatrick. “We understand how important the daily paper is to a large number of people in our region. However, this is a major step to make sure we are leading, not trailing, in the world of innovation and solutions.”

Advance Publications, which owns the Times-Picayune, has not announced plans to scale back at its three publications in this region, but one expert said conversations about taking that step already are happening at a time when newspapers across the country continue to grapple with declining advertising revenue and print sales.

“I think it will happen,” said former Knight Ridder executive Ken Doctor, who writes the Newsonomics blog. “The question is time. I know there are discussions within [Advance Publications] about how quickly to proceed with its other newspapers. I don’t know if a timeline is set, but there have been discussions on how and when to do this.”

Average Sunday circulation for the six-month period ending March 31 was 125,549, up 3 percent compared to the same period a year earlier, according to figures released Tuesday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, a media industry group. Sunday is the most important day for newspapers since it brings in the bulk of advertising revenue.

Weekday circulation was down 5 percent, to 100,196. The Morning Call attributed the decline to “the impact of the single issue price increase to $1.50” and “repositioning … to grow Sunday and other key advertising days of the week.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer-Daily News Building in Philadelphia, PA. Taken from North Broad and Callowhill Streets. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: If you have followed the sale of the Philadelphia newspapers, this article gives some perspective on what that might mean for Philadelphia from an out-of-town perspective.

Is there anything more forlorn than the American metropolitan newspaper? First readers began deserting in droves, then the advertisers followed. Family owners headed for the exits and then hedge funds and other financial players scooped up newspapers thinking they were buying at the bottom of the market. Greater fools came and went, each saying they could cut their way to former glory and renewed profitability. They got a haircut instead.

Many smaller community newspapers remain stable and newspapers with a large national footprint have generally done better. But quite a few of the midsize regional and metropolitan dailies that form the core of the industry have gone off a cliff: over all, the newspaper industry is half as big as it was seven years ago.

So if most newspapers are an uneconomical proposition incapable of sustaining profits, let alone pay off the debt so many buyers have larded on them, who is left to own them?

The Philadelphia Inquirer-Daily News Building in Philadelphia, PA. Taken from North Broad and Callowhill Streets. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

PHILADELPHIA, PA — A group of powerful local business leaders announced Monday that they have purchased Philadelphia‘s two largest newspapers from hedge funds for approximately $55 million, a fraction of what investors paid for them in 2006.

It is the fifth time in six years the newspapers are being sold.

The buyers, who include influential New Jersey Democrat George Norcross III, former New Jersey Nets owner Lewis Katz and cable TV mogul H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, said they plan to keep the newspapers’ tradition of strong journalism alive in the digital age.

News reports surfaced this week that two hedge funds with major stakes in the company want to sell. The firms, Alden Global Capital and Angelo Gordon, had led the creditors’ $139 million takeover of the company at a September 2010 bankruptcy auction.

Rendell could not confirm their intentions, but said a third party has been reaching out to potential investors in recent weeks. The media company would be bought outright, he said.